


uphold the right

by mindthewolves



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/F, Racebending, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-05-24 20:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14961635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthewolves/pseuds/mindthewolves
Summary: Supercorp, if Kara landed on earth just before World War II.





	1. (july 1944 - january 1945)

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr prompt fill for @friendscallmefred

the restaurant throngs with customers as you make your way to an empty seat in the corner. it is the seventh day of the seventh month, and you’re not looking for anything, not really.

but sometimes. sometimes it sneaks up on you, lights a match under your skin. the fleeting thought of a smile in the dark and a heartbeat under your fingertips that’s not yours, somewhere to belong and someone to keep your stories. a singularity and an impossibility. but then, you’ve always wanted the impossible.

“careful, doctor,” a customer murmurs as he passes you on his way out, words sour with alcohol.

you forgot you’re still wearing your white coat. it’s a short walk from the hospital.

he throws a pointed glance at the woman sitting alone at the corner table. “she’ll sell us all to the enemy.”

and you’re half a room away, but the woman must hear him – she hunches lower over her food, as if she’s trying to make herself as small as possible, and her fingers go still around her chopsticks. you watch the way people slurp their noodles standing at the bar rather than sit near her, and when you get closer you see why: she’s ainoko, an in-between child, and she looks it. her hair is almost but not-quite black, a few shades too light to be anything but mixed.

you pull out the chair to her left, but she doesn’t look at you. the waiter brings your sake, condensation beading on the ceramic in the warm air, and now you really should have left your coat at the dormitories. it’s not like you’re on call, and you just want– you want to be a little sloppy, for once, for a little while. the sake slides down like an ember in your throat.

there are three dishes and a soup already on the table. at first you think it hasn’t been cleared, and grimace at the waste. but then the ainoko woman plucks a bite from each dish and wolfs it down without seeming to chew.

“are these all for you?”

she looks up, eyes wide, and the flush across her cheeks suggests the answer to your question is yes. she mumbles an answer around a mouthful of food, completely unintelligible.

“please, don’t choke on my behalf.”

“I–“ she tries again once she’s swallowed, but the whine of fighter planes crescendoes overhead, drowning out her voice as they turn toward the military targets along the coast. you hear the low growl of bombs dropping in the distance. the tremors beneath your feet come a moment later, and the lights blink out.

fear congeals in the dark. you can feel the weight, the cold of it, slithering in the gaps between your fingers. no one talks. time stretches out like taffy, thinner and thinner but infinite, and then a chair scrapes over the floor somewhere to your right and all at once the power flickers on. whispered conversations swell to fill the room.

the chair next to you is empty; you hadn’t even seen her move. the ainoko woman is halfway to the door when you hear “spy” and the crowd turns mean.

(the bombs are proof of nothing. it happens every day; it’s clockwork. everyone knows this. but war is the line between us and them, and she’s on the wrong side of that line. she’s every misgiving and uncertainty made soft and surmountable, and more importantly she’s here, within reach.)

the set of her mouth is hard, but the edges of the crowd are jagged.

you grab her before they do.

they might think less of you, but they won’t touch you. not when your hair is the right shade. not when their sons and brothers and fathers might still pass through your hospital, and under your hands. the white coat is thin – doesn’t even keep you warm in winter – but you wear it like armor.

her pulse stutters beneath your fingers as you pull her through the door. no one follows, but you take the busy streets, the lit paths. a thread of warmth trickles across the back of your thumb, and you raise her wrist for a better look.

“you’re bleeding.” a four-centimeter gash on her right forearm. it’s not pulsing, but it’s deep. the margins are clean, and you wonder if it was a knife. “someone cut you?”

“–what? oh. it’s nothing,” she says with a wave of her hand, and this time you hear the faint trace of an accent, every word a little too careful, too perfect. “I’ll stitch it up when I get home.”

“ _you’ll_ stitch it,” you repeat, trying to press the disbelief out of your voice.

the woman laughs, shaky, but she holds herself straighter. “you sound skeptical. really, it’s fine.”

“let me do it. it’s hard to hold tension with one hand.”

“you’re a surgeon?”

“an internist. my mother’s the surgeon.”

she shrugs and follows you up the steps to the hospital dormitories.

#

you twist the key in the lock. she steadies herself on your arm as she toes off her shoes, her palm impossibly warm through your sleeve, and you shiver at the casual touch. you’re not used to it. she doesn’t seem to notice.

the room is a mess. laundry hangs from one wall to the other, still half-wet. the chairs are piled high with textbooks, bookmarked by photos and long-forgotten notes scratched out on the backs of envelopes. at least the tatami is clean, even if the blankets aren’t folded.

you give her a towel and a clean shirt from the dresser. “bathroom’s in there.”

instead of leaving, she holds the shirt close to her chest, as if she’s nervous. “why did you do it? stick your neck out for me.”

“you’re not a spy.”

“but how do you know?”

you shrug. “there are enough monsters in the world without going looking for them in the dark.”

maybe that’s enough for her, because she heads into the bathroom. then she turns back, one hand on the doorway. “thank you, for doing it.”

the sound of the tap filters through the door as you kneel on the tatami, rummaging through your supplies for iodine, suture, and a curved needle. you look up when the door creaks open. 

she’s wearing your shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and there are a few dark strands of hair plastered to her cheek. in the half-light of the room, there’s something too soft about this moment, too domestic when she’s just a stranger, really. the rooms of your heart throw an extra beat, like they always do when you’re anxious, and you turn away to try and hide it.

“let me see.”

she settles next to you, back against the dresser. she holds out her hand.

“other hand,” you say reflexively, because there’s just a scratch. a thin line, scabbed over; you can feel the tooth of it under your thumb. but it was her right hand, you remember it – the strength in her fingers and the scrape of her bracelet against your inner wrist. you watch as it scars over, turns white, and disappears from her skin altogether. something out of fairy tales and fables.

eiji used to tell you stories like that. women with shadows in the shape of foxes, shifters and dream-walkers who could protect or destroy as they wished. “are you kitsune?” you ask, the first thing that comes to mind.

she laughs, and it’s a beautiful laugh, gentle and without derision. “not quite.”

“but you’re not human.” why this leap of logic, you’re not sure – you’re a scientist, and okay, maybe you’re a little drunk, but you don’t believe in children’s stories.

(except, you do. you want to. you want the legends to be true and the giants to be real, a world where kindness is repaid and prodigal brothers come back and someone cares. you want someone to care.)

“no. not human,” she mumbles, rolling down the sleeve. “I told you – I didn’t need it. I was never in any danger.”

“then why did you let me–”

“because you made me feel safe.” she turns your hand over, drags her nails across your palm.

you throat is suddenly, inexplicably dry.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” she says. she tilts her head, listens. “it sounds different than other people’s.”

“genetic defect. there’s a hole in my heart that never really closed; that’s why you hear that extra sound.”

her hand stills. “humans are so fragile. are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. it’s not that uncommon.”

“you’re afraid.” she’s close enough that you can see every eyelash, the fissures of her chapped lips. “your heart’s racing.”

her gravity is proportional to the product of your mass and hers – nothing compared to the pull of the planets and stars – but you fall into it anyway. you can feel the warmth radiating off her skin, the shimmer of it like an enchantment. “yes.”

she frowns and pulls back a little, her eyes flicking to yours. “of me?”

“no,” you breathe, and she surges forward.

you turn your head slightly to deflect the kiss, but your hand comes up to catch her jaw, holding her close. it’s not a no, but it’s not a yes, either.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“kara,” she says, her lips brushing your neck. “my name is kara.”

#

her hair fans out across your pillow like the aerial roots of a banyan tree, and she whines into your mouth. “have you ever – more, _please_ , ah, don’t stop – have you done this before?”

satisfaction swells under your ribs. “…once or twice.” not with anyone who could look at you again in the morning, but you can’t regret it as she comes around your fingers. the walls are thin, and you swallow her moan on your tongue.

she tastes like you, like iron and like salt, and it’s your own fault your heart was made wrong but it doesn’t seem to matter so much just now. her fingers tangle in your hair as you flop onto the bed, and she falls asleep next to you, sleepy and warm.

#

the walk into the mountains is like climbing into the upper reaches of a dream, switchbacks and air so thin it’s threadbare. instead of trees, tall stones mark the horizon, smudged by the morning mist. one stone in particular you’re looking for. here the grass is carefully kept, and nothing else grows. 

you touch the stone lanterns like a greeting. they’re not lit, will never be. (maybe they light the way home, but not for you.)

unscrewing the lid of the thermos, you pour and the water seeps into the stone, rivulets running into the delicate hooks and curves of his name. your name is there too, on the back of the stone, beside your mother’s and father’s. the grave is empty; there’d been nothing to bury.

you wash the small altar before setting a paper cup on the marble and pouring the hot chocolate. the steam curls up, twisting, braiding itself with the sky. you’ve brought takoyaki, wrapped up in newspaper, and you set that on there too.

“sorry, it’s cold.” it’s become a habit, talking to him here, as if he could ever hear you. you don’t know why you do it.

the rain is so fine it doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air, like motes of dust, and the sun is a new thing, too soft to burn away the fog. you rock back onto your heels, settle cross-legged on the mountain. there’s still an hour before your shift.

“yesterday was tanabata,” you say as you unwrap your rice ball. it doesn’t bode well that these are your favorite breakfasts, not-yet-dawn in a cemetery with your dead brother. it’s quieter than the cafeteria at the hospital, less lonely than eating alone in your apartment. “you would have hated the festival.”

because it is a day for lovers, the one day each year that the weaver meets the shepherd across the sky river, but you’d never seen it so somber. even the bright colors of the yukata seemed faded in the shadow of war. then you saw the little boy counting out change as his grandmother made takoyaki, and you almost turned over your shoulder and said, remember that day when–

but there was no one to tell the story to, because eiji’s gone. wrapped in that green imperial air force jacket, fear and glory whispering in his veins, carrying suns on the wingtips of his plane. aimed at a harbor and drowned in a harbor.

he dies for his country and his country forgets.

the sea took his body, but you chose the grave, with more care than some people would choose a house. from here it’s shaded by the forest, and you can see the thin line of the ocean on the horizon.

you were so mad at him when he left. _you’re nothing to them, just a body, just a weapon. they’re wasting you because it’s convenient._

and he’d taken the belt your mother had sent him, a thousand red stitches on a white cloth, sewed by a thousand different people, and tied it around your wrist. _I can’t question an order_ , he said, his voice small and lost and young. _you need this more than me. like you said, it’s a one-way trip._

(you never said: I’m your sister, I’m proud of you, I’ll miss you.)

“I tied a wish in the bamboo for you. that your friends will stay safe, that when this is all over there will be no empty chairs at the kitchen table.” 

you knew it was impossible even as you wrote it. but you wrote it anyway, every word careful, as if a wrong word or a forgotten stroke might interfere with the wishing. you chose a branch that was green and strong and growing, and you tied the tanzaku around it. strong knots, surgical knots, made to mend.

you stepped back from the bamboo grove and its thousand slips of wishes. keep safe. eat well. stay warm. come home. simple things that shouldn’t have to be asked for, and they tugged at you with the force of their wanting. there was a soreness in your heart, like when you eat something sour, and you thought: how the knots will slip loose in the days to come, how the rain will wash out the ink, how the paper will tear.

#

kara comes to you only at night. you never thought she would, but she comes back. weeks turning into months. it’s not always sex – one night she brings you a bento of tempura soba (“you didn’t get to eat that day because of me,” she says), another night a pack of cards. she asks why you became a doctor and you find yourself telling her about your mother. 

you’ve never been close – her patients came first, and you remember the first time you went to find her on the wards after school, how she’d been warm and charismatic and completely different from the way she was with you or eiji. she spent more nights at the hospital than she did at home. you understand her better now as an adult, as a colleague, the way she was caught between a career she loved and the family she was expected to have.

“she must be proud of you though,” kara murmurs. the rumble of her words tickles your ear where it rests against her collarbone.

“hm.” 

“she’s proud of you, _lena_.”

#

you’re on call the morning the boy comes in: on a stretcher, lungs filling with water, one week shy of draft age. wandered too far into a storm, and the typhoon wouldn’t give him back. a good swimmer. his friends are with him, went into the water holding hands until the current washed him away. you listen to the history, every detail bringing him back to life even as you examine the fixed pupils and know it’s too late.

you press your knuckles into his sternum and check his reflexes before you pronounce him. in peacetime he’s just another tragedy, just an accident, but in war you can’t let it go. he escaped the draft, so he should have lived. the closeness of it eats at you, like a lottery ticket in which all the numbers match but the last.

it’s late afternoon when the parents wander into the lobby. you’ve never been good with faces, but you recognize them immediately. everyone comes here seeking something, medicine or answers or soft words; they’re the only ones who aren’t looking for anything. you take them down to the morgue.

formaldehyde and bleach stain the air. the overhead lights are cold, and you want to apologize, to offer a jacket or a blanket, but you do none of these things. the room is empty, except for a young encoffiner washing one of the bodies with a sponge. she nods to excuse herself, color rising on her neck as she washes her hands, and there’s something you can’t quite place your finger on, something familiar in it.

out of context you passed over her, but on second glance of course you recognize her, the way she holds herself. (the way she held you.) there’s the sharp intake of breath when she knows she’s been made, and her eyes are wet when they meet yours.

“wait,” you mouth when you walk by, ghosting your fingertips over the crook of her elbow as if you could press the word into her skin, make her stay. kara nods again.

you pull open the drawer tagged #204 and slide out the tray. “take all the time you need. we’ll give you some privacy,” you say to the parents. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

they’re words you’ve given and received a hundred thousand times. for you, they carry no meaning, they’re just packaging, but still you say it. you hope that for them, for this first time they’re hearing it, it will matter.

kara follows you into the hallway, leans against the sink along the wall when you stop.

“so you do walk in the daylight,” you say, but she doesn’t laugh. “your eyes are blue.”

this time she smiles. “you just noticed?”

“I was always…preoccupied, before.” the corridor is empty, so you put your hands on the edge of the sink, bracketing her on either side, and press your lips to the corner of her mouth. she doesn’t kiss you back. she’s trembling, and when she blinks, a tear spills over. “kara?”

she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to lie. it’s just – you’re, you’re _you_ , and I–“ 

you slide your hand over her jaw and thumb away a tear. “what did you lie about?”

kara waves a hand in the direction of the morgue, frustrated. “this. what I do, working with the dead. people cross the street when they see me. they won’t eat at the same table. I didn’t think– I didn’t think you’d want to be seen with me, if you knew. and I’ve…polluted you.”

“is that what you think of me? kara, I touch the dead and dying every day. this is war – people will have to learn to be less fastidious about these things. everyone’s lost someone,” you say, looking over your shoulder at the morgue doors. “I used to have a brother.”

you’ve never told her, but in the hospital it’s common knowledge. the other staff work with you, they respect you, but you keep your distance and they’re content to let you, as if your bad luck is catching.

something flares in kara’s eyes, and she sounds almost protective when she says, “I know. people talk. they say you’re brittle with your loss, but I don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen how hard you fight for everyone else – your patients, even me when I was just a stranger.”

“you were never just a stranger,” you say, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind kara’s ear. “did you know who I was, that night?”

“I knew _of_ you. that night when we left the restaurant? you looked like you had ghosts, and I thought – I wanted to tell you – I know what it’s like. to be left.”

“I’m sorry you have to know. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” she’s never talked about family, and you can’t help but wonder who kara’s lost but you don’t press. “come have dinner with me,” you say instead, because you don’t want to be alone tonight, because you don’t want _her_ to be alone.

#

after, kara slips her hand into yours and takes you into the mountains. it’s a familiar path to the boneyard, but she turns left where you would have turned right and there’s a garden growing wild and beyond that, a small house.

“this is where I grew up,” she says, sliding open the screen doors. unlocked, even though the doors are paper. the green scent of tatami mats reaches you on the night air.

kara takes off her shoes and steps in first, lighting the lamps as she goes. you watch her, leaving a trail of light in her wake, effortless and somehow otherworldly, like a shooting star stitched into human skin. the house itself is simple – a low table in the center of the main room, kitchen comfortably cluttered. it suits her.

garlands of paper cranes hang from strings taped to ceilings, doors, walls. most are plain, folded from newsprint or calligraphy paper, the thin red lines of the calligraphy grids unmistakable. but here and there scraps of brightly colored paper stand out, bold as wildflowers.

she looks up from where she’s setting mugs and snacks on the table. “my foster father taught me to make them.”

you don’t have to count to know that each wreath is a flock of a thousand, threaded together. a thousand for a miracle: the price of a wish.

(you wonder why she folds so many, if she has that many wishes or if they’re all the same wish, asked for crease after crease and never coming true.)

“what was he like? your foster father.”

her brow furrows as she pours the boiling water over the leaves, watches them unfurl in the heat. “quiet,” she says finally. “I don’t mean in a distant way, but more like – I don’t know how to describe it. a kind of quiet that gave you space to be you.” 

you nod, suddenly at a loss for what to say, so many questions and nowhere to begin. your time with kara has always felt finite, borrowed, a ship without an anchor. but this is different, being here, in her home. it matters in a way you can’t define, the ground beneath you somehow both shifting and solid and you’re nervous again. you’ve waited too long to answer and now the silence clunks between you, awkward and unwieldy.

kara slides the plate of black sugar mochi closer to you, and you’re grateful for the distraction.

“thank you.” it’s the perfect texture and temperature, to the tooth and slightly chilled. you raise your hand to lick the rice flour from your fingertips, but kara’s faster.

she catches your hand, takes your fingers into her own mouth instead. her tongue is warm, her incisors sharp as they scrape across the ridges and valleys of your fingerprints. and then it’s easy: you pull her closer, your mouth crashing over hers and her hands slipping beneath your shirt, settling between your shoulder blades.

“do you really want the tea?” she pants between kisses, and you laugh, and shake your head no.

#

she’s tracing her way up your spine when you come back to yourself.

“eiji took me flying once,” you mumble, drifting on the borders of sleep. “I don’t think it was legal. we were in the clouds, it was raining, but I’ve never felt so boundless, and so reckless. like every needle of rain and every growl of thunder was a part of me, passed through me. it’s like that, with you. I love the way you make me feel.”

it’s the closest you’ll come to a confession. kara’s quiet, her fingers gone still on the nape of your neck. you wonder if you’ve said too much. or maybe you haven’t said enough.

“I’d take you flying, _lena_ ,” she says finally, reverent and so soft you almost miss it.

you turn in her arms. her hair is silvered in the moonlight.

“why do you call me lena?”

“do you mind?”

“no, I’m just…curious.”

kara’s thumb runs over your knuckles, traces the lines of your palm by touch. “it’s the name of one of our stars. we weren’t lost – the ship knew where it was going – but _I_ was lost, and she saved me. watched over me.” she shrugs. “I know it sounds childish, I know stars are just plasma–“

“no,” you say, lacing your fingers between hers, “it doesn’t.”

“I was named for a star too,” she says sadly. “in a different constellation; you can’t see it from earth.”

“will you tell me about krypton?”

“what do you want to know?”

“everything.”

#

 

1\. 

this is how it starts: the matrix chooses. its decision is immovable, and the stylus etches two names onto a scrap of bronze. the house of el is old, but the house of ze is older.

the algorithm writes out a name for the second in-ze daughter as well. an acceptable match. she refuses.

 

2.

the law snaps shut around astra's wrists, the metal cold and brittle. you've heard this story already. but what if we could tell a different one?

she wears the cuffs against her skin like jewelry. defiant in the face of defeat, because she can't be anything else. where her sister is steel – exacting, unyielding – astra is water, bending around limits, pushing and pulling at the boundaries of things. gentle at the edges, but deadly when she wants to be. her back is straight as her own soldiers lead her into holding.

alura, always fair, visits her the night before her ship leaves for the phantom zone. "the law is harsh, but it is the law," she says.

it is the closest to an apology she can manage, and astra knows it. they are sisters, after all. they were the same cell once.

"your law is blind," she spits back at her. "our home is dying."

“but you will survive.” alura's voice is cool, but her palm is warm when she presses the spy beacon into her sister’s hand. she lifts a finger to her lips. 

they’ve been rivals so long, it takes a moment for astra to realize she’s being kind.

 

3.

at twelve, stepping into the glassed bay of an off-world ship, kara makes a deathbed promise. she doesn't know it at the time. the weight of her mother's necklace is warm over her sternum as she climbs into the ship, the crest of her house a comfort over her heart, and she says goodbye.

her cousin clambers into a second ship just behind her. protect him, they'd said, and she will. she wonders how long it will take to save the planet, how long until they can come back.

(in retrospect, the clues were there. it is the middle of the night, and the dock is quieter than she's ever seen it. and the ships – they're black market pods, unregistered, launched in secret. it is the first and last law alura breaks.)

kara is a light-month away when an incandescent glow feathers the dark sky behind her, like someone's lit a lamp over the universe. the ship’s AI has seen such things, and it is the one to tell her her planet is dead. 

she turns to look, just once. the light blooms outward like a flower. there is no sound.

 _your respirations are above the upper limit of normal_ , the AI says after a while. _are you sure you’re well?_

the silver ball in the flow meter floats higher and kara fights to slow her breathing, to save oxygen. she turns all the settings to low, dims the cabin lights, runs the system diagnostics in the background; she’s flown enough to know that these small ships are not equipped for long flights. she’s the daughter of a judge, the niece of a general. she doesn’t cry.

instead she lets her mind fall quiet, entrains her breathing to the slow spin of the little bead in the flow meter until it falls back down to normal levels.

 _you are very quiet_ , the AI says.

kara curls up in the bay of the ship, knees drawn up to her chest, head pillowed on her arms. her sleeves are wet. “will I be okay?” she says, her voice barely a voice.

_I do not understand the question._

“will everything be right,” she tries again.

_I’m sorry, I do not have sufficient data to make that determination._

kara closes her eyes. she knows the limits of an AI, prefers to talk to the rudimentary ones with their lilting inflections rather than ones like this, that sound too close to human. you forget they’re still a machine, and it’s harder not to get frustrated with them when you run up against the constraints of their programming.

“do you know where we’re going?” in all these weeks, she’s never asked. it’s never mattered before, because she was always going to go back.

 _earth_ , the AI responds, and kara tucks the word into her pocket. it’s a good word – sturdy, simple. earth.

 

4\. 

what is deathless? the universe and the certainty of change.

the universe, but not krypton.

she can’t even see rao from here, and maybe that’s gone like everything else. blown out like a candle, leaving her world unlit.

she wants to say the intercession for the dead, it's the right thing, but she doesn't know the words. she’s too young to have seen a sky burial, to have known loss. so she asks the ship. and the ship provides.

_–forgive us our living and our dead, those who are present among us and those who are absent. open the doors of your house to them; keep them safe and sound and forgive them. wash them with water and snow and hail; wash them of wrong as a white cloth is cleansed of dirt. give them a home better than their home and a family better than their family. make their memory good, and fill it with light._

rao’s not there to hear her, so instead she looks for the twelve points of the stag, picks out the fixed star that burns brightest. it’s the torch-bearer that she asks.

(kara’s never been to a funeral, but she knows this: you’re not meant to say the words alone. you’re supposed to be with the family that you make, cooking and talking, laughter and spices and stories in the air. a funeral is supposed to fill the spaces left behind. and the ship tries, but she’s not sure it counts.)

this is what she holds on to, in the nothingness between planets: a star, and a ship.

the ship teaches her many things. the history of earth, how to tell time, the names of animals. she learns a language she never knew existed, rounded consonants smooth as riverstones in her mouth, the glyphs curled like dried leaves in fall. the sounds of this language are too light, like sea-foam and like meringue. her teeth and the bones of her jaw shift to accommodate them, and it feels like a betrayal.

her name-day comes and it is only the ship who notices, who nudges an extra ration bar into the day’s allotment. time means little to her in the void. _you should know a blessing on your name-day_ , it says. _that is how things should be. may you never go hungry, kara zor-el._

at thirteen she emerges from the protection of the stag. she’s grown now, and it’s rao she should trust to guide her way. (should, but he wasn’t there when she needed him.) instead the steadfast crown of the stag is still the first thing she looks to when she wakes, the last thing she sees before she sleeps. lena, the twelfth star, the torch-bearer.

she learns that her new planet sees different patterns in the stars, tells its own stories about how they came to be. she learns that earth has a yellow sun, that once they land she will be alien, no longer human. 

“but I haven’t changed,” she tells the ship, “I’m still me.” 

the ship replies, placid: _it’s not about who you are; it’s about who’s doing the looking._

kara doesn’t argue after that. the people of earth, the ship has taught her, do not welcome those who are different. she has the dark hair of the house of el and the stormy in-ze eyes, and there is no country for her, as far as the ship knows. _but I will land you where those differences are least visible, it promises. the sun will rise on you there before it rises on the rest of the world._

she only half-listens, because what does she care about a sun that’s not hers?

this is not an origin story. it begins with a destination.

 

5.

when she lands, it’s in a forest like nothing kara has ever seen on krypton. tall and willowy and green, with leaves shaped like sickles and joints every few handspans, but no branches. their unmitigated strangeness is the first thing she notices.

the second is that earth is _loud_.

there’s no one around for kilometers – the ship made sure of it – but she hears everything. the whisper of sap running in the blood vessels of the trees, the drum beat of birds’ wings overhead and the push-pull of the tides, a thousand conversations in a language she can barely follow. it’s too much. 

she squeezes her eyes shut, but she can still see, even through her eyelids: the ghosts of the spindly trees and, beyond that, structures that look like houses, people shuffling around inside them, bones gliding under the people’s skin and this planet is unbearable and it’s not home it’s not.

 _are you hurt, kara?_ the ship asks, because she’s keening, high in the back of her throat.

she shakes her head, digs the heels of her hands into her eyes. “please make it stop.”

and the ship, bless its crystalline heart, begins to sing. a children’s song, layered with the voices of many parents and old with power, old with love. it catches every once in a while, the ship’s drives damaged in the crash, and it sounds almost like grief. almost real, and for the first time kara is grateful for its simulacrum of a human voice.

she focuses on the ship’s voice, on the dark familiar syllables of the kryptonian words, and the trees turn solid again. the world gentles around her.

kara pulls her sleeve low over her hand and sweeps the glass chips from the cabin. the shards don’t cut her; she can barely feel the edges. she curls up in the pilot’s seat, and the ship sings her into sleep. it stays with her into the early morning hours, and then it fades. its generators are damaged from the crash; it’s done the best it can.

and then she’s alone, except for a ship that’s dead and someone else’s language in her mouth, japanese a half-century out of date and foreign, foreign, foreign.

the second ship never lands. kara waits, and watches the sky. you can’t break a deathbed promise.

 

6.

this forest knows death; it has known it far longer than kara. 

in the morning, as the sun burns away the mist, she sees the stones – mossed-over, rows like soldiers, carved with names. steles for honors and guild assignments, she thinks. but there’s a pattern to the names, they’re dynastic, and kara looks at the stones again, brushes her fingers over the wet moss. this is the earth way of celebrating a death. it just takes her a while to realize.

she stares at the ground until it yields, turns translucent for her in the strange way it has ever since she landed. beneath the steles there are urns; and in the urns, ashes and bits of bone that did not burn. she picks out a half cup of skull, a ship-bone, the roots of a tooth, and she thinks about the bones of her people, lost and drifting between stars. part of the galaxy, always.

the first alien she sees is a puppy. an entire litter of them, brindled silver like tigers. they tug at her skin with their sharp small teeth, and she feels nothing beyond a slight pressure. the silk of their fur is softer than anything she’s ever touched, and they curl to sleep around her, the easy rise and fall of their round bellies a comfort, steady as the push and pull of waves. their mother keeps a wary eye on her, but doesn’t drive her away.

she runs out of ration bars before she runs out of water, and it’s only when hunger begins to gnaw at her that she wanders from the ship. at sunrise the dogs pad on silent feet to the outskirts of the forest and she follows, hiding in shadows, a few steps behind. 

a human lays out a row of wooden bowls on a low table in front of the gravestones, scritching behind the puppies’ ears as he goes. he has gentle eyes, she thinks. this man is older, hair silvered with age, but the eyes remind her of her uncle jor-el – dark and watchful and kind, softened at the edges with wrinkles.

still, he’s a stranger, and only when he leaves does kara slips into the sunlight, mouth watering. it’s simple food, but it’s warm, and better than flight rations.

she tries not to take too much. but it’s weeks; the dogs grow thinner as kara grows taller, and she feels like a thief. the first snow sifts down and she doesn’t mind the cold – doesn’t really feel it, but it’s the silence that seeps through her skin, makes her wrap her arms around herself for warmth. even sound seems to crystallize in the frost, and the grove is so quiet she can hear every footfall on untouched snow. she hasn’t heard another voice since the ship.

the spy beacon blinks sleepily at her, the one thing she’d thought to take, and she runs her thumb across the engraving, over and over. the in-ze crest: _uphold the right_.

three words, and they’d shaped every decision alura ever made. everything she taught her daughter. on street corners where beggars lined up for a meal and a place to sleep, in the sentencing courts where she’d sat at her mother’s side: _is that right, kara? is that just?_

(for astra, they’d meant something different. “the house of el is proud,” astra had said when she gave kara the beacon, “but the glory of krypton was won by the in-zes. remember that you are your mother’s daughter too, and that ours was the right to rule.”)

one of the puppies stirs in its sleep – the black one, with the white sock. kara can count the ribs through its coat, the fur less glossy than it was only a few weeks ago. the dog whuffs against kara’s neck, warm and trusting, and she thinks, _I don’t have the right._

she can’t stay here; she’s a guest on this planet and already she’s done nothing but take. the next morning she leaves behind the ship, and the dogs, and waits for the man who leaves the food on the altar. _I’ll come back for kal_ , she tells herself, and she follows the man home.

from outside the ricepaper door, she watches him make tea. the steam rises fast and mesmerizing and secret, and she clutches the spy beacon in her hand like a lifeline. the ridges of her skin press fingerprints into the metal. he pours two cups, and sits down with his back to the door. “what’s your name?”

“kara,” she says, and okay, that’s japanese enough.

“are you coming in? tea’s getting cold.”

and so she does.

she mirrors him, sitting with her legs folded under her, and he sets the tea in front of her. “you’re ainoko, aren’t you? half,” he clarifies when she stays quiet.

kara fidgets. she wonders what things he sees in her. _I’m whole, still_ , she wants to say, but maybe that’s not the truth anymore. the ship told her about a species of lizard here that drops its tail when hurt, grows a new one like it’s nothing, like it’s forgotten. she’s not sure she can do the same.

“can I stay here?” she asks instead, because she doesn’t know the answer to his riddle. “just for a little while. I’m waiting for someone. I can, uh– help carry water, and cut firewood, and–”

“you can stay,” he says, “you don’t need to do the rest of that.”

he doesn’t ask who she’s waiting for, and eventually, well, she doesn’t exactly forget, but kal fades to the back of her mind. she lets krypton slip through her fingers too, a phantom she knows is there but doesn’t poke at, doesn’t feel the contours of. there’s a hole in her heart but she can live without knowing the dimensions.

 

7.

for the first time since krypton, she sleeps under more than stars for a roof. the scent of the tatami is clean and grassy beneath her cheek, and she runs her fingers over the fibers, tracing the weave of it.

it’s seiya who teaches her how to be human. to take off her shoes before she steps into the house, to sip slowly at tea when it’s hot. 

he saves the pieces of fish belly for her even though they’re his favorite, because she has trouble picking out the fine splinters of bone. (they’d never hurt her, but she feels them when they catch in her throat, like little swords. she’s never seen one alive, but from this she concludes that fish must be vengeful creatures.)

he shows her how to make the offering food, and when she points out that the dogs eat all of it, not the spirits, he says, _the dead are fed on our sincerity; why shouldn’t the dogs have what is left?_ it’s strange the way he talks about the dead, as if they continue on, as if they’re more than just a memory. 

people bring him their dead – she watched through the window once – and seiya turns the bodies to ash, gives them back in a vase. kara wonders if he’s some kind of prelate. people respect him, she can read that in the measured tones of their words and how they bend before him, with their whole body. but they don’t love him. they’re not friends. and she wonders if it would be better, to have the ash of your family close to you, instead of giving them to the sky.

she tries very, very hard not to break things. she copies the way he walks, like he’s tethered to the earth. she learns to be gentle. and to his credit, he lets out only a very small yelp when he goes to wake her for breakfast one morning, and finds her floating half a meter above the floor.

kara crashes to the ground, startled awake by the stutter in his heartbeat. “I can explain,” she rushes out, scrambling to her feet.

“please do,” he says, patting his hand over his heart, but even as does he’s setting rice and slices of sweet omelette at the table and gesturing for her to start eating. the girl talks easier when plied with food, he’s found.

and maybe it’s the food, maybe it’s that she’s carried a thousand ghosts in her heart, trillions of kilometers across the galaxy, alone – but she takes a bite, and chews, and the floodgates open. 

in the years to come she’ll learn to tell this story clean, without adornment and without so much as a waver in her voice. but this first time it’s raw, and she tells it in scraps: how the summers grew longer with each passing year, how the storms began. the look in astra’s eyes that last day, hurt and disbelieving, as if she could no longer be sure of kara. the coolness of the fountains when zor-el took her to wash the red dust off her feet; how after, he swung her over his shoulders, laughing. how she wishes she had even a little bit of that sand now, to remember it by.

seiya lets her talk. he spoons more rice into her bowl when it’s gone and passes her another plate of grilled fish, and the words spill out of her like water. when she is done – gravity is nothing to her here, but still she feels a lightness. it doesn’t change the facts; krypton is gone, will always be gone, but it’s a sadness she can swallow now, and not one that swallows her.

she tells him about the gifts she got in return, unasked-for, unearned. skin that won’t break, eyes that won’t close, ears that are too good. for two weeks she sees the oil lamp flickering through the paper of seiya’s door, and at the end of it he comes to her with a blanket.

the brocade is finer than any style she’s seen on krypton, clouds in gold thread against a dark sky, and she knows it’s expensive. seiya places it in her hands. it’s heavier than she expected.

“my brother was like you,” he says. at first kara thinks he means alien, but he continues, “the world was too loud for him.”

she looks into the distance, changing her focus – she’s better at it now – and as her vision shifts she can see the pockets sewn into the fabric and filled to bursting with rice grains.

“he used to lie down in the pantry, with the family’s bag of rice over his chest. he said…that it made the world less bright. smaller.”

kara curls up on the tatami mats, pulling the blanket over herself, and the weight of it is a balm. she’s been vapor, buzzing and too-bright and spilling out of her own skin, but the blanket gathers her, presses her back into solid form. her pulse thrums slower, slower.

there are pinpricks of blood on the pads of seiya’s fingers, and she doesn’t say anything because he wouldn’t want her to, but she sees, and she remembers.

she wriggles so more of the blanket crushes against her and closes her eyes with a happy sigh. “thank you.”

(as it turns out, there’s a difference between knowing the impossible and believing it.

kara insists on cooking for his name-day. she’s seen him do it, after all. she mixes the corn starch, flour, water, and egg, and soon she’s holding a brace of battered shrimp by the tails and lowering them into the hot oil by her fingertips.

seiya looks on in horror. “careful, it’s–“

“–hot?” kara laughs. “I can barely feel it.”

so maybe she’s showing off. for once, the speed and the flight and the invulnerability are a part of her, not just a consolation prize. and if the world has decided to start being fair, well, she gets to have fun with them.)

 

8.

the heat vision comes in like permanent teeth, and her eyes are so sore they hurt.

seiya says it’s a fever, it’s perfectly natural, and didn’t you have colds on krypton? he feels her forehead and puts her to bed. 

when she wakes up, there’s porridge beside her mattress. she gets a few spoonfuls in. the tick-tick of the abacus reaches her through the paper walls, soft and reassuring, and she follows it into the common room.

“feeling better?” he says as he carries the total in his books, each column annotated with what they’re spending on rice, on fish, on the urns for the ashes he gives.

“a little.” kara rubs her eyes, bleary with sleep, and a mirage shimmers over the room, hot and colorless. the crisp lines of the sliding doors bend like the reflection in a pond, and seiya screams.

the blue of his sleeve is bright with fire, the wrinkled skin underneath already blistering and filling with water.

she closes her eyes tight tight tight and curls into herself on the floor. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she keeps saying, the knuckles of her thumbs digging into the bony orbits of her eyes, tears staining her cheeks and evaporating just as fast in the heat.

she blinks behind the shield of her own hands, and her gift settles like dust: fine and uneasy, waiting for the slightest wind.

it’s not until seiya crouches next to her and puts his hand on her shoulder that she relaxes, leaning into him. “it’s just a burn,” he says in his low voice, “it’s nothing. open your eyes.”

she shakes her head and burrows deeper into his shoulder. “I hurt you.”

“I work with fire every day, you think I haven’t been burned before? you can’t be afraid of it. sometimes it will bite. but you learn to use it well. you can’t fear something and still control it.”

it takes months, but she does learn. first to recognize the pressure headache that builds behind her eyes, and then to direct it, to shape it. she cooks without ever igniting the pilot lights, and lights his cigarettes with a blink. one day seiya turns on the crematorium when it’s empty, and she holds her hand in the fire to feel how high the flames reach.

the next time a family comes, it’s kara who burns the coffin – “they can’t get deader than dead,” seiya says, very reasonably – and later, when the remains have cooled, she watches the family pick out the bone chips from the ashes, and set them into an urn.

 

9.

the freeze breath grows in last, winter in the middle of summer, and kara laughs in delight.

in the spring seiya sends her to school, because _your handwriting needs work and you’re too young to be spending all of your time surrounded by coffins_. nothing kara says sways him otherwise.

“we had arithmetic on krypton too,” she mutters as he hooks her lunch bag onto the handlebars of the bike that first day, but she pedals away.

the principal brings her back at lunch.

“your daughter is intractable,” she tells seiya over tea and slices of chilled yokan. “she won’t sit down in class, she talks back, she’s a bad influence on her fellow students.”

kara waits outside, nudging rocks into the creek with the tip of her shoe and listening to every word.

when seiya comes out, she’s busy architecting a miniature dam, diverting the creek a few centimeters to the left. “they think there are only nine planets!” she complains as he comes into earshot. “everything they say about the stars is _wrong_. the teachers don’t–”

“this is not krypton.”

kara looks up. his voice sounds thin like spring ice, black with the color of water underneath. she has never in all these months seen him angry, not even when she burned his arm, but she’s seeing it now.

“your country looked so much to the stars that it died behind you. that’s why you’re here now, isn’t it? they only knew how to take, and they used up everything the world had to give them.”

“it was a whole planet. not a country,” she says weakly.

seiya is unmoved. “maybe we’ve never been among the stars, maybe we never will, but you could learn something from the earth. krypton’s is not the only knowledge that matters.” he tips his head toward the house, where the principal still sits, where kara can hear her humming under her breath. “go apologize.”

and she does go; she swallows her pride, she lowers her eyes. at school she cultivates a reputation for small magic: bending a spoon without touching it, cooling a drink between her palms, a certain sleight of hand. it wins her an audience, acquaintances, friends. 

(it does not go unnoticed. many years later, when the military is looking for weapons, someone will float the rumor of a bulletproof girl who can kill with a single glance. but it’s all country superstition, they’ll say, and she is never sought out, never conscripted.)

she finds that seiya was right, that krypton’s is not the only knowledge that matters. 

kara can set up equations to keep a ship in space but she can’t solve them in her head as fast as eizo, or hold the map of the city and all its alleys in her heart. it must be a beautiful thing, she thinks, to belong to a city so well you always know your place in it. she watches hana salvage one watch for another, take it apart and put it back together in a flawless surgery, and she wants to say _krypton would have made a place for you, you would have belonged._

it’s only later, with the benefit of decades behind her, that she guesses at the reasons why seiya insisted on a school, beyond his respect for education: so she’d stitch asao and hana and eizo into her own family, so she wouldn’t be alone again.

in retrospect he was old, but she hadn’t realized how much. the walk to feed the dogs in the forest takes seiya longer and longer each day, and one morning kara finds him wheezing in bed, as if he’s drowning in perfectly good air. she runs for asao, who’s just been admitted to medical school, but in the end it’s hana who rigs a ventilator from a drink bottle, straws, and an old aquarium pump. it works, for a few months.

kara is away at university when he dies. she gets a telegram –

哀悼の意を表します

the messenger won’t look at her. the ink bleeds grey into the grain of the paper.

she catches the next train back and buries him. eizo and hana help her pick the bones from the ashes. they stay into the evening, not talking, but there. eizo makes her tea before he settles next to her to read, belly-down on the floor. kara rests her head on hana’s shoulder, watching her callused hands tinker with a toy water-well that no longer pumps water into its tiny brass bowl. she thinks about order and disorder, about the fraying ends and weakening knots of the world, and she wonders if anything good can stay.

when the war comes, she takes a job no one will touch, washing and dressing the dead the way she couldn’t do for her own people. it’s unclean, or so they say, but to kara it is almost a compulsion. to her there’s a holiness in it, the goodbye that she never got to say.

#

you’ve migrated back to the living room, cross-legged on the floor and knees almost touching kara’s as she tells you bits and fragments of her story. your tea’s grown cold, been reheated by kara, and grown cold again.

“is that what the cranes are for?”

“not really. seiya taught me as a way to focus, to filter out the noise. I was forgetting krypton, and he said to write down every memory, every person I’d ever met, and fold the memory into the paper. that way krypton would always be here when I needed it.” 

kara stands up and holds out her hand. “you should sleep; it’s almost light out.”

you follow her to bed, sleep deprivation making you sluggish. you’re asleep almost as soon as your head hits the pillow, but somewhere in between the wilderness of dreams you hear her call you back. “lena?”

“hm?”

kara rests her head on your shoulder, and you love the weight of her, warm and heavy as sunlight. 

she murmurs into your shirt, “you bury me. okay?”

you don’t understand, at first. at first you think it’s an expression, lost in translation from kryptonian, and you understand it intuitively because it’s exactly how you feel – overwhelmed by a swell of emotion, caught in its undertow. the haze of exhaustion doesn’t help. it’s only later, replaying her words in your head, that you realize: it’s not an expression but a hope.

she’d rather you be the one doing the burying.


	2. (february 1945 - september 1948)

**february, 1945**

they’re in lena’s office. kara loads a record into the player and lowers the stylus, turning the volume down low enough that for lena, it’s inaudible. to kara, it’s perfectly clear: every grace note, the bite of bows on string, the breathing of the orchestra. even the scratch of the needle as it runs along the grooves.

lena’s lying on the floor with her knees drawn up, flipping through charts upside-down. she scratches out a note, frowns, shakes her pen, and tries again. diagnoses and prescriptions surround her like a paper maelstrom, and kara has to tiptoe between them to get anywhere.

wordlessly, lena lifts her head so kara can sit before laying it back down in her lap. she reaches for the next file.

_––HR 60 | RR 22 | BP 87/50 | T 33.5 celsius_

8 year old ainoko male with unknown past medical history, evacuated by EMTs from a burning home following air raid over his neighborhood. pale and clammy upon arrival in ED, with bradycardia and cyanosis of the fingertips concerning for smoke inhalation vs sepsis vs CNS anomaly or trauma vs adrenal insufficiency––

“anything interesting?”

lena smiles. “nothing that will filter down to you, if I can help it. what are you listening to?”

“I don’t know. it was in your collection.” she reaches over and turns up the dial. “we never had music like this.”

lena taps her bare foot in time with the beat as she turns another page. 

_––next of kin has not been located. patient well-hydrated, well-nourished, awake and alert but nonverbal; baseline mental status unknown. no burns apparent on inspection though exam was not completed due to limited cooperation. easily slips out of padded restraints placed secondary to agitation; chemical restraints ordered in consideration for the safety of medical staff. IV access attempted x4, unable to establish due to unusually tough skin––_

she freezes. “kara, do you ever get cold?”

“in the winter? sure, but I can’t feel it.”

“but you said you could freeze things, drop the temperature around you.”

kara laughs. “you want a preview?” she says, and exhales a silver plume of frost. the windows fog over, beading with condensation.

“color me impressed,” lena says, though she sounds more distracted than awed. “I have to check on a patient. I’ll be right back.”

#

“just _wait_ , kara,” lena says, throwing a hand across the door to bar her way. it’s more symbolic than anything else – she could never physically stop her – but she’s also noticed that sometimes kara forgets that fact. she’s learned too well how to be human, and so she’s bound by human rules of physics and gravity.

“it’s him, I know it’s him.” kara lifts herself onto her tiptoes to peer though the narrow hospital room window. “the cowlick, and the mouth, god, he has my father’s mouth.” she trails off, watching the still figure on the bed. “I thought he’d be older.”

the boy lies spread-eagled on the bed, hands and feet in padded cuffs tied to the rails. his expression is slack, the eyes empty.

“what did you do to him?”

“we had to sedate him–”

“how could you do this? he’s not dangerous. he’s a kid!”

lena puts a hand on kara’s arm. “he’s also kryptonian. kicked an EMT and broke three of her ribs. kara–“

but she shakes her head, folds into herself. “I should have looked for him. all this time, he was right here.”

“come on,” lena says softly. “let’s take a walk. I’ll bring you back to him when he’s awake, I promise.”

#

the boy is stirring when lena closes the door softly behind her. the room feels more like a refrigerator than a hospital despite the radiator in the corner, and she watches his every exhale, tinged with frost. she sits on the edge of the rickety chair by the bed and waits as his eyes slowly focus in the dim light. his lips are blue.

“shō? my name is dr. kiyohara. I work with dr. ikeda, but she’s with another patient right now.” 

“did they find my parents?” he slurs, still groggy. he looks far too small for the bed.

“we’re still looking.” lena unbuckles the leather cuffs one by one and he grimaces, rubbing the circulation back into his wrists and ankles. “I have a friend who wants to meet you. is that okay?”

he nods yes, curling his knees up to his chest, but he barely stays awake long enough to see her leave.

when he comes to again, there’s a different woman perched cross-legged on the empty bed across from him. no white coat, no stethoscope, but she’s in-between like him, and she’s beaming.

“you’re awake!” she lapses into kryptonian, the words rusty and creaking on her tongue. “it’s so good to see you, kal-el.”

he doesn’t respond, and she switches back. “should I call you shō?”

“can you say that again? what you said before, in the other language.”

she does, and shō frowns, a look of concentration furrowing his brow. “I think I know what you said. I don’t remember how to say it back.”

“you were so young when you left. do you remember me?”

“ _zha_ ,” he says simply. no.

her smile dims a little, but then it’s back. “it’s okay, you were just a baby the last time I saw you. I’m kara. I’m your cousin.”

“I don’t have any cousins. I fell from the sky, like kintaro – I’ll never die, or grow old like you.”

“even kintaro must have had a family. one that loved him very much.”

“no, they’re not in the story.”

kara sighs, the conversation fraying faster than she can mend it. “when did you fall?” she says, using the same word he chose.

“august 7, 1930. it’s my earth birthday.”

lena comes in with an armful of blankets, tucking them around shō. the cold seeps from him, into the fabric, into the metal rails of the bed. “how are you feeling? your temperature’s still low.”

he shivers. “I don’t know how to stop it. it just happened.”

she sits on the edge of the bed. “so what do you do on your earth birthday?”

shō sits up, the blankets puddling around his legs. “first we go to a shrine, and then mom makes everyone a bento and I get to help. last year I rolled the sushi and the year before that we made omurice and the year before that – I forgot. and we spend the whole day in the mountains and eat it there.”

lena smiles. “I used to go to the shrine in hiroshima with my brother on my birthday. he couldn’t cook for beans, but he’d buy me snacks.”

“big brother?”

“yeah. big brother.”

“I always wanted an older sibling.” he looks back over at kara. “are you really my cousin?” he asks softly.

“of course. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

but shō turns away from her instead, hunching over the pile of blankets. kara can see the knobs of his spine through his school shirt. even with her hearing, she can barely make out his words, muffled by the blankets.

“if they called you, that means my mom and dad are dead. right?”

she’s thought about what she’d say if she ever saw him again. there was a speech. she’d tell him about the world that was once meant for them, the minarets of argos city sweeping the red sky at sunset, and she’d tell him why their parents stayed behind. (captains go down with their ships, she’d say. she’s had years to make peace with it.)

but in none of her rehearsals was his loss not also hers, a shared gap-tooth in the sky where there used to be a red sun and a god. in this scenario, the only one that matters, she is just a poor substitute, a stranger come too late.

“they found them this afternoon when they cleared away the rubble,” lena is the one to say. “I know it doesn’t change anything, but I really am sorry.”

he doesn’t answer. in fact he doesn’t make a sound, but his body shakes as he cries. lena kicks off her shoes and shifts further onto the bed, rubbing small circles between his shoulder blades until he eases into sleep. when his breathing evens out, she raises herself carefully off the bed and, making sure the blinds are pulled, pulls kara into her arms one bed over.

“are you okay?” she murmurs.

kara nods against her shoulder.

“kids are resilient. and you’re family – nothing changes that. he’ll love you once he gets to know you.”

“you don’t know that.”

“I do,” lena insists. and then softer, her voice low and rough and beautiful: “ _I_ did.”

she says it roundabout, but kara’s fingers tighten over her hipbone, and lena knows she heard the confession snuck into it.

“you’re good with him,” kara says, quiet and more than a little sad.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep–“

“no,” she says, reaching up to cup her cheek, and lena leans into her touch. “that’s all I meant. it’s like I saw a glimpse of another life, us as a family, no bombs in the middle of the night, no soldiers.”

lena turns her head slightly, presses a kiss in the center of kara’s palm. “I’d like that.”

“do you think he’s okay? medically. I think I saw a bruise.”

“they’re generally not fatal,” lena says wryly.

“is your bedside manner always this charming?” kara grumbles, and lena just laughs.

“I think he’s more human than you, though. at least phenotypically – he was raised as human, that’s what his mind expects, so he bruises. and then in the fire, my theory is that this“ – she runs her finger along the frost limning the bed rail – “was just instinct, almost an immune response. I don’t think he knows how to turn it off.”

“but he’s kryptonian now, he’s awake. I could teach him.”

“darling, he’d be kryptonian with or without your many gifts.”

#

**april, 1945**

shō goes home with kara. she enrolls him in a school in okayama, and in those early days lena visits every day, just to check on him. she looks over his math when he’s done, brings over armfuls of ingredients after work to show him experiments. one night it’s a glass bottle and a hard-boiled egg, and she sets him the task of getting the egg through the smaller mouth of the bottle without breaking either.

(he eviscerates four eggs by brute force before he figures it out on the fifth.)

“just stay,” kara says after he’s gone to bed, and lena’s gathering her things, “it’s late.”

in the morning lena wakes up alone, but she can hear the oyster pancakes sizzling on the teppan. shō and kara are in the living room, doors thrown open for maximal sunlight, moving through one of the kryptonian kata. a cool breeze flutters through the room in time with kara’s breathing, and it’s like being in the ocean, pushed and tugged by each wave.

lena takes over at the griddle, flipping the pancakes when they’re crisp at the edges. she knows the exact moment kara’s concentration breaks; the breeze falters, and kara resets to her starting stance.

“sorry, I guess I don’t remember all of it. it’s been a while.” _corrupted data_ , she’s said about her memories of krypton, and how much it unsettles her. but she shrugs it off, turns to lena with a smile. “ohayo.”

it creeps up on her, really. it just takes her a while to see it.

lena pulls an overnight one day and still goes back to kara’s when she could crash in her own bed, her own apartment not forty steps from the hospital. she hasn’t set foot in it in more than a week.

“tadaima,” she says reflexively as she exchanges her shoes for slippers. I’m home.

“okaeri,” shō calls out in response, zooming into view to hug her legs. kara looks up from the curry she’s ladling into bowls, and lena’s heart nearly stops. not because this day is any different, but precisely because it’s so ordinary. she’s sleep-deprived and running on fumes, but in this moment she’s exactly where she wants to be.

there’s a soft _ehrosh :bem_ from kara, always quiet, always intense, as if she never wants lena to think it’s rote or taken for granted.

#

**august, 1945**

“I stole some eggs,” kara says abruptly in the middle of the night.

“oh. that’s nice.” usually lena makes a game of her sleeptalking, asking her to spin stories and answer impossible questions, as if her subconscious were a latent oracle. but incendiary bombs burned out most of the city and the hospital is a shambles, patients on makeshift pallets lining the streets, burns infected and drawing flies. this is the first time she’s slept in her own bed since the strike.

“no, really. I stole them.”

lena rolls over to face her. “…from a hen?”

“off the black market.”

“kara,” she says, wide awake now. “you could go to jail for this.”

“don’t worry, I was fast. they never even saw me.”

“why do you even need eggs? we’re still getting by.”

she shrugs. “it’s shō’s earth birthday coming up; I wanted to do something special for him.”

“and what would that be, exactly?”

“do you know how to make steamed egg cake?”

#

between a scientist and an alien, they manage to do a decent job of it. lena has the monday off, so they celebrate a day early. kara wakes him before dawn.

shō opens his eyes blearily but gets up, reaching under the tatami for his school uniform – blue blazer, white shirt, blue shorts – pressed flat overnight by his body weight. he changes and slings his backpack over his shoulders. “where are we going?”

“somewhere eiji once took me,” is all lena says. eiji has become somewhat of a myth to him, this big brother he’s never met who used to take lena to baseball practice and out for breakfast after, who in high school punched a boy in the mouth for following her home from school, and the words are like magic.

shō straightens his spine, the film of sleep already fading from him.

(lena falls in love with places the way others fall in love with people. she hoards them, the sprawling banyans with crawlspaces between the roots and the hidden lakes and the snack vendors who’ve been there four generations. she holds a secret map of them in her mind, and gives them out like keys to those she’s let into her heart.

this place, she’s taken kara once before, and the whole time she was so uncharacteristically quiet that lena had to laugh. “you can talk, it’s not a temple.”

“no, but it feels like one,” she’d said, and dropped her head on lena’s shoulder. “thank you, for bringing me here.”)

this time they bike out to seto sea, the sun trailing behind them like a kite on a string. the road drops sharply away on the left, and they pick their way down on foot across rocks slippery with surf. there’s a small cove at the bottom, hidden from the road.

shō toes off his socks and shoes, playing chicken with the leading edge of the water and dancing back at the cold.

lena laughs. “come eat first!” she hands him a bento box sectioned into nine squares, each with a morsel of food: grilled fish, roasted pumpkin, pickled seaweed, tamago with a cartoon bear seared into the center (courtesy of kara’s heat vision), steamed egg cake for dessert.

they rock-paper-scissors for the largest slice of cake.

“saisho wa gu, janken pon!” lena’s stone loses to kara’s and shō’s cloth.

“aiko de sho, aiko de sho, aiko de sho,” shō chants, breaking the tie as he cuts kara’s cloth with his scissors.

he settles the box on his knees, bare feet buried in the scorching sand, and digs in. kara upends the lid of her box, placing it between the three of them to collect fish bones.

the sun glimmers off the wrinkled glass of the water, and the roar of the waves and wind curls along the high walls of the cove like a bottled storm. there’s a chain of small islands a few kilometers out to sea, lush and overgrown with forest, a pod of dolphins arcing in and out of the water between them.

lena watches their dark shapes weaving beneath the surface, lost in thought. they’re what eiji brought her to see, years ago, exhausted and half-delirious after taking her college entrance exams. one had brushed past her in the water, almost like a cat, but eiji had warned her about interacting with them. ( _they’re wild_ , he’d said, _if you tame them, you’re responsible for them. you can’t keep a promise like that._ )

shō’s attention is elsewhere. for lena, it’s a smudge of smoke on the horizon, barely a speck on the horizon. she can’t make out the sharp outlines of the destroyer, its turrets heavy with artillery and the imperial navy in formation on its decks. the way they salute, crisp as a freshly starched shirt. but shō sees all of it: the battleship, the three snub-nosed silver planes above it, carrying english letters on the tails.

he looks up only when kara passes out the bottles of marble drink, one to him and one to lena.

“happy birthday, shō-chan,” she says, clinking bottles.

there’s a flash of light behind him as the sun comes out from behind the clouds for just a moment, like a tiny star born and dead; and there is time, in between seeing it and finding out what it means, for lena to think it beautiful.

the glass bottle shatters in kara’s hand, fizzy drink bubbling away into the sand. the marble rolls into the sea, unharmed, and kara screams, doubling over with her hand at her throat, gasping for air. her eyes are unseeing, molten red and glowing from irises to sclerae, and her tears boil away with an audible sizzle.

at first lena thinks: stray shrapnel, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured appendix, if kryptonians have appendices. she crouches next to kara, shards of glass cutting her knees. there’s no blood on kara’s shirt. her abdomen is soft, and she doesn’t flinch at lena’s touch but she’s still drowning on dry land, breathing faster than her lungs can expand.

shō reaches out, butterfly-soft, and squeezes kara’s hand in his smaller one. his voice is low and urgent, a stream of kryptonian too fast for lena to understand. but in japanese he says, “there was a bomb. I heard it.”

a cloud plumes behind him, like a dandelion on a stalk.

“there are bombs every day.” lena splays her hand over kara’s sternum, and her voice is calm as iron. “breathe into my hand, kara. pull your breath towards my hand.”

and kara obeys. she files the jagged edges of her breathing into something smoother, grounds herself in the bite of sand against her shins, lena’s knee against her knee, shō’s hand in hers. her heart is bloated and bruising, full of the same sadness that crept into her blood the day krypton died. she drops her head to lena’s shoulder and draws a shuddering breath.

“they’re dead,” she says, her voice thick.

“what do you mean? who?”

kara shrugs helplessly. she’s had her finger on the pulse of this country for so long, and now there’s only silence where tens of thousands of heartbeats should have been. but even in this, there are survivors. she knows it by the sobbing that follows suit, the quiet _I wish I could help yous_ to people beyond help.

it’s shō who answers lena’s question. he tilts his head, as if listening to a conversation lena can’t hear. “hiroshima,” he says finally, but his eyes are still unfocused, like he’s looking through her. “hiroshima is gone.”

“that’s impossible. no bomb causes that much damage.”

“it’s not a lie,” shō says, and his voice is ancient as the trees. “I saw it fall from one of the planes.”

and it comes back to her then, a dinner party at professor yukawa’s house in osaka. he was a theoretical physicist, and he spoke of physics like an invisible scaffold on which the universe and the future rested, applications for theory that distilled the science from science fiction. on the obverse, a clean energy source, enough to sustain the globe for millions of years; on the reverse, a bomb.

lena laughs, improbable and wild. “they beat us to a fission weapon.”

kara draws back to look at her. she’s never heard lena speak in these terms, us and them; she loves her country, but she tolerates the war. “would it have been better, if we’d gotten it first? if we’d used it first?” she says angrily. “we had technology you could only dream of, on krypton. but we never made weapons like this.”

and krypton is not kara’s fault, but this is. earth’s battles are not her battles, and she is not a soldier; she has never interfered. but she could have, and her inaction makes her culpable.

they pack up the empty lunchboxes for the climb back up to the main road. just before she clears the top of the ledge, kara looks back, and lets the heat prickle at the back of her eyes. all she sees is light, and when she’s done, she is human for a little while. the messy, shuddering grief fades away into the kilometers between, and it’s just her and shō and lena.

she cuts herself that night pulling a sliver of glass out of lena’s shin.

#

the rumors grow like weeds, but there’s no word in or out of hiroshima. lena’s tried. it’s midnight when the american president issues a statement.

_“We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won. […] What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history. It was done under high pressure and without failure._

_We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war._

_It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which–“_

lena turns off the radio.

she doesn’t pace, exactly, but she flits from room to room, rearranging the objects on the windowsill, wiping down the kitchen counters, putting away the dishes. kara watches, helpless. there’s an animal understanding rising in her, the certainty that this – the uneasy happiness they’ve pieced together in the middle of war – is coming to an end.

when lena comes to sit beside her on the tatami, she knows.

“you’re leaving, aren’t you,” kara says before lena finds the words. 

“it’s my home,” she says, as if it explains everything. and in a way, it does. “I was scared today.”

“we were all scared.”

“no. not for hiroshima; I can’t change the damage that’s done. today I realized that if you get hurt or sick – I’m a doctor, but I wouldn’t know what to do. if the meds we have would work, how I’d even get a simple iv in. I won’t be able to help you.”

“I’ve never gotten sick in my life, lena.”

#

news limps its way out, slowly, unreliably. by the time it reaches them, it’s sixthhand and seventhhand, truth tangled up with shadow. they say everyone died twice: killed once by the blast, once by the heat that followed. they say the bomb leaves behind a disease in those it touched, even the survivors – their children, and their children’s children. they say there are four doctors left in all of hiroshima, and lena’s heart stops.

she wonders if she will be lucky, or if she is already an orphan.

“we’ll fly,” kara says when lena tells her. “I’ll take you.”

it’s different from flying with eiji. both wilder – the wind tearing at her clothes, the thin air making her dizzy and delirious – and gentler, kara’s body warm against hers. they’re ten kilometers out when lena sees the epicenter, the rubble and broken buildings an indistinct radius of gray, obliterating the clear architecture of the gridded streets. 

(kara sees it too. but her kryptonian eyesight also shows her: an overturned god in the ruins of a temple, a dog chained to a collapsed building and panting, the body of a child hollowed into charcoal.)

her vision folds in on itself like a gate slamming shut and she’s falling out of the sky, eyes wide, heart sprinting, neck muscles working with every breath. she barely manages to bring them out of freefall, and her shoulder scrapes a furrow in the soft mud of a rice field.

“lena! are you okay?” kara says, pale and shaky as she gets to her knees. she lifts her right hand, examines the palm, then the dorsum. “I feel like…when your arm falls asleep, but it’s my whole body.”

this time lena recognizes a panic attack for what it is. they hitch a ride on an ox cart back to okayama.

#

shō has questions. why she’s going, why her, when she’ll be back.

lena crouches down in front of him and takes his hands. they’re warm, like kara’s. always warm. “my mom is there. I’m her daughter – I have to go. and I swore an oath,” she says, “to help people in exchange for what I was taught. I can’t go back on that.”

“but kara needs you.” he frowns.

“kara has you,” she says, as gently as she can. “you have each other.”

he nods, the muscles of his jaw set, and kara follows lena out to where the ambulance is waiting to take her home. she’s wearing a sweater in august, the sleeves long enough that she can worry at it with her fingertips.

“are we–“ she starts, and lena turns back. “is this over, between us?”

“what?” lena throws her arms around her then, in full view of the volunteer firefighters in the ambulance. “I don’t think I’ll ever be done with you, kara zor-el.”

her words fall against kara’s skin like a brand, and kara hugs back as hard as she dares.

“itterasshai,” she says when lena steps back. go, and come back safely.

lena kisses her on the mouth. “ittekimasu.” _I’ll go, and then I’ll return._

#

the roads are impassable as they get closer to the hospital, closer to the epicenter of the bombing. lena passes out the packs of supplies, and they each carry as much as they can, balancing on shifting piles of rubble. 

stillness blankets the city like a pall. in the quiet she can hear the whoosh of her own blood ringing in her ears. near the old park there’s an iron gate still standing, leading to nowhere, keeping nothing out.

they cross a bridge, skirting the shadow etched into the planks by the heat blast. the outline leaves nothing to the imagination: a hunched figure walking with a cane, its ghost burned into the bridge forever. a lady in the water, robes bright, viscera trailing like a white belt.

they get lost several times in this labyrinth without walls. there are no roads to say where they might be, and no landmarks to navigate by. in a way it’s like the desert – every direction the same, every landscape changeless.

it’s summer, and every so often the debris gives underfoot with a squelch like overripe fruit. lena’s steps quicken to put distance between them and the smell of rotting flesh in the air. she could stay in hiroshima indefinitely, she decides, anything to avoid walking back the same way they came.

in the distance two small boys stack a pyre over the dead body of a relative, flicking a cheap lighter to spark the fire. they stand back and watch, the younger boy vomiting into the dirt on the side. the older boy looks on, stoic. he is shō’s age, and lena has nothing in her heart left for them.

the teaching hospital is short a wall and a south wing, but it’s standing. there are patients lying on pallets outside the door, burned and buzzing with flies and eerily still. she asks for dr. nakamura.

(the girl who hurries away doesn’t say outright that she’s dead, and lena – well, it’s not relief exactly, but a loosening of the knots, like leaving your shoes at the door after a long day.)

minutes tick by, and anxiety builds in her again until she’s buzzing with it. she gives up on stillness.

“name, vital signs, and injuries,” she says, opening a pack of ballpoint pens and passing them out to the volunteers. “category one for critical, two for delayed, three for wait. zero is expectant or dead.”

she crouches beside the nearest patient – adolescent male, breathing nonlabored. she puts her fingers on his pulse – the left wrist, because his right hand is bright red and tense, the skin sloughing off in patches.

his eyes are unfocused, and he makes no move to resist her as she examines him. a school jacket lies crumpled at his knee, embroidered with a school crest and a name that she scrawls on his shoulder. _cat two._

to his left, a mother sits with her arm looped protectively around her young daughter’s shoulder.

“we’re not hurt,” she says, shaking her head when lena approaches them. “just some nausea, but it’s getting better. the others need your help more.” she points to a pallet a few spaces down.

 _cat three._ the daughter rubs at the words with her thumb, and the ink smears.

lena doesn’t think anything of it in the moment. but in the weeks and months to come it will be a constellation that haunts her: the nausea and vomiting, the violet lesions in the mouth, the fever and bleeding and emaciation, hurtling into death.

the old woman is lying on empty rice bags, carefully arranged beneath her. there are fourth-degree burns over her torso and pelvis, revealing the yellow fat and the white bone beneath. her spine is curved, shoulders crooked on the makeshift tarp. lena can barely feel a pulse.

“haruko,” she rasps when lena asks her name, each breath grating against her trachea. the skin over her throat is sloughed and charred.

“what’s your family name?”

her eyes are shut tight with pain. “haruko,” she repeats. “haruko.”

lena squeezes her hand, papery with age and cold in the summer air. “it’s nice to meet you, haruko.”

for a moment she considers the vials of morphine in the supplies they brought from okayama. it wouldn’t be a waste – mercy is never a waste, her mom used to say – but the drugs will be a limited resource, and she thinks better of it. _cat zero_ , she writes on the obāsan’s wrinkled skin. she moves on.

a flicker of movement catches in her peripheral vision, a figure in a white coat silhouetted against the doorway of the hospital. lena stands up.

“aya.” her mother’s voice breaks on her name. her arms are open, and lena steps into them easily, breathing in the smell of antiseptic. she can’t remember the last time she hugged her like this.

“I thought–“

“shh,” she soothes, and holds lena tighter than before. “better me than you. a child buries a parent, that’s just the order of things. a parent burying a child–”

“it won’t happen,” lena says automatically. she leaves the again unsaid.

her mother pulls back, and for the first time, lena notices the dark circles under her eyes, the silvered strands in her dark hair.

“are you here to stay? we could use an extra set of hands.”

and lena nods. “I’m staying.”

#

kara puts her hands on shō’s shoulders. “they will forget this day. in a year, a decade, a century, but you’ll remember. you will be the conscience of the world.”

“but I just found you,” he says, blinking fiercely. he can’t look her in the eye, so he stares at the stitching on the seam at her shoulder instead.

she smiles. “I’m so glad you did.” her eyes slide closed as she listens to the faraway drone of a b-29, the staticky disembodied voice coming over the radio. “I have to go. tell lena– if I don’t come back, tell her I loved her.”

shō stands barefoot on the polished wood floor of the engawa and watches. his cousin takes off with the brutal kryptonian grace that will become famous one day, the ground buckling under her feet.

at 11:02 am on august 9th, kara curls her fingers over the tail of a bomb and tugs it up, up, into the outer reaches of atmosphere. the metal cuts into her fingers with the weight of four thousand kilograms beneath it. she’s seventy kilometers above the ground when its plutonium core explodes.

#

it’s been three days. they’ve been working through the night to stem the flow of patients, but the case volume is finally coming down. they’re running out of antibiotics.

lena’s not a surgeon, but she’s learned to be, debriding necrotic tissue and harvesting sheets of skin before running them through a mesher to expand them for the graft. the operating theaters are sweltering without air conditioning, the better for burn patients to conserve heat with a compromised skin barrier.

in a lull between cases, lena pushes through the double doors of the hospital and out into the cooler night air, faint and struggling to pull in lungfuls of air. someone passes her a cup of water, and she takes it gratefully. sitting on the steps, she rests her head against the wall and closes her eyes for a few seconds. she hasn’t slept in thirty hours.

there’s an earthquake in her dreams, a soft thud, and lena opens her eyes to see kara, glowing like she’s swallowed the sun and looking so, so uncertain.

she reaches out to touch lena’s jaw, runs the pad of her thumb across her lips. tentative, as though she’s afraid to break her, and when lena moves into her touch kara’s skin is feverish.

“what happened to you?”

“I absorbed the second bomb.” kara shakes her head. “I had to see you.”

“how did you get here?”

kara kisses her instead of answering, hard and fast and messy, and when her palm wanders over the soft skin of her stomach, lena rocks her hips up unthinking.

she pulls away with a groan. “I, uh–“ she uses kara’s shoulder as a pillow, lets kara be the one holding her up. “as much as I would love this, I still have two emergent cases to go.”

“where are you staying?”

“resident housing. room 213.”

“okay,” kara says breezily, as if she didn’t fly all night just to see her.

“okay?”

kara shrugs. “the work you do matters. and I’ll be here, when you’re done.”

and she is. four hours later, when lena’s washed the smell of charcoal out of her hair and stumbled to bed, kara curls herself around her. she leaves before the morning, but lena knows she’s been there: stray strands of hair on the pillow too light to be lena’s, a trace of her body heat caught in the folds of the sheets.

#

**september, 1945**

when lena walks through the double doors, there’s an empty bed with clean sheets where her favorite patient used to be. the high school student who went to the same school she had – he’d gone from playing basketball with his one good hand to lying in bed, skin stretched over bone and bleeding from his gums.

he’s neither the first nor the last. she’s heard many names for it: atomic bomb disease, atomic plague, radiation sickness. sometimes the burn wounds healed, taking the graft, only to break down days and weeks later. nothing has worked – the vitamins, the calories, the transfusions. she believes in medicine, but for the first time it’s not enough.

the wards, overflowing just a few weeks ago, are now only half-full.

her mother goes hunting for a solid cancer, something she can cut. lena’s convinced it’s liquid. she sets up shop in a corner of the cafeteria, poring meticulously over the charts for patterns and early warning signs, teaching herself to read the mass spectrometry readouts from blood samples.

she dreams of a oral chelator, built like a puzzle piece to fit a radioisotope and shuttle it safely out of the body. but for it she needs a synthetic chemist with no way to find one, and time her patients don’t have. she teaches herself instead, out of dated textbooks and an abandoned lab.

it’s one of these nights that she hears the radio from a patient’s room across the hall. the failure of the second american bomb is proof of god’s favor, etc. and lena winces. she wonders if there are witnesses to the flash, or the faraway mushroom cloud that bloomed, or the woman who absorbed the death of nagasaki. if they’re looking for kara.

the war drags on.

#

**december, 1945**

it takes months for the unearthly glow to fade from kara’s skin. she ventures out only at high noon, when she has the sun as camouflage, and on overcast days it’s shō who interfaces with the world for her, standing in line for rations and getting himself to school.

she watches from afar as lena fills blue notebook after blue notebook. and from not-so-far away; she’s woken up with envelopes tucked into her shirt, in lena’s handwriting.

_for future reference, you sleep-walk through the sky_

on the back of the page was a blueprint of structural formulas and reactions, written out step by step and crossed out in frustration. but another time, when it was going well:

_it’s like connecting the dots. I miss you._

the memory of panic is too fresh for kara to attempt the flight again, but she takes to sleeping with a strip of paper tied around her wrist.

_next time, wake me up_

#

**august, 1948**

hiroshima was proof of concept.

in times of stress, the sympathetic nervous system diverts resources away from ancillary functions, constricting the blood vessels in the periphery, decreasing urine output and salivary secretion and digestion. but amidst the scarcity, the heart and lungs are spared, privileged.

the war is stretched thin – soldiers without armor, without weapons, hospitals without basic supplies – but japan’s fission program is given everything it needs. and it succeeds. 

its engineers have scraped together enough uranium for a single bomb, shaped like an egg, and on august 6th, three years to the day, it is dropped over new york as the sun rises. it is the first time war has touched their mainland.

the united states retaliates in short order: kyoto, yokohama, niigata. shō throws himself over the first bomb, so that it detonates at a lower altitude than expected; it craters the earth, but the damage is attenuated. kara carries the second bomb on her back and for a brief moment she hesitates, torn between deliverance and destruction. she doesn’t make it to the third.

#

the emperor surrenders, and the occupation installs a clinical research trial in hiroshima and niigata for the hibakusha, the survivors. lena is not allowed access.

she gets it anyway. these are her patients; they invite her to dinner when other neighbors or friends or family have shunned them, and they’ll speak to her.

“how are they treating you? is it helping?”

“there is no treatment.”

lena puts down her chopsticks. “what do you mean?”

“they are just watching. they take photographs. data,” an elderly man says, gesturing to the burn scars twisting in ropes across his arms. “the doctors say we are lying about the radiation sickness. that even if it were true, it is a very pleasant way to die.”

she presses the pads of her fingers against her temples, warding off a migraine. “why do you let them do it? they’re offering you nothing.”

he shrugs. “we lost the war. what leverage do we have? where else would I go?”

#

young men in green army fatigues knock on her door the next morning. they confiscate everything: her research, the medical records of the hibakusha, biopsy slides, photographs, and films, haphazardly dumping everything into empty paper boxes and throwing them onto a truck.

“they’re classified, ma’am,” is all the explanation they give.

the radio station for the occupation announces a new freedom of the press for japan. liberation. democracy. it celebrates the bomb for sheer efficacy, a mercy weapon to end all war, and remains silent on its aftereffects.

lena goes to the newspapers instead, with a draft of an article and the few photos she has left. the editors make her tea, and then they say no.

“but you know it’s true,” she insists to one of the editors as he stands to usher her out of the room. he’s young, and he holds his right arm at an angle, like it’s contractured by scar tissue hidden under the long sleeve shirt. there’s the tip of a burn scar poking out from his collar.

he looks at her carefully. “sometimes, when I’m just waking up, I try to sit up and find that I can’t move at all. even breathing – I can’t get enough air.”

“sleep paralysis.”

“exactly. I’m awake, but I’m trapped in myself. do you understand?” his gaze flicks to the occupation soldier - the censor, she realizes - in the doorway.

(the emperor surrenders, and lena goes to see kara.)

#

okayama university hospital gives lena all the lab space she needs, and kara gets her a retired chemist. his name is tamio.

“how did you find him?”

kara shrugs. “he has a stall next to the history department. makes the best red bean pancakes in japan.”

lena narrows her eyes in suspicion. “I can’t even tell if that’s hyperbole, with you.”

they camp out at the lab, kara tutoring shō through his schoolwork and tamio working with lena to iron out the snags in her synthesis. she’s had three years to trial-and-error her way towards a chelating agent and she’s close, but he has an instinct for it, an elegance in his approach to the problem, that she lacks.

“I’m too old to be pulling all-nighters,” he says one night as they plan out the final step, and lena’s inclined to agree. her eyes are blurry with sleep, and her headaches are getting worse.

but the reaction works, at least in theory. it needs to be tested for dosing, efficacy, toxicity, but those are problems for another day. they dry out the bluish-white grains of the drug, and funnel it into one hundred and forty-six gelatin capsules. their celebration is quiet, and lena finds herself crying in relief.

it’s nearly dawn when lena picks shō up from his makeshift pallet in the corner of the lab. he’s getting too big to be carried, but she manages half the walk home before she gets winded, and kara takes over.

“when it works,” kara murmurs to her that night, “and you’re the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, what are you going to name it?”

she laughs, and whacks kara in the head with her pillow. “you’re ridiculous.”

but later, softer, she says, “el corp.” and she traces a finger in the shape of a crest over kara’s heart.

#

lena sleeps through the next day and night, fevered and achy. when she wakes up, she almost stumbles over an emaciated deer lying listlessly on the engawa, along with a fluffle of rabbits.

“they’re from a forest in niigata,” kara explains helpfully.

she laughs. “are we opening a zoo?”

“tamio said you needed to test the drug. they were the sickest I could find.”

“it might not work. it might make them sicker,” lena says. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

kara soothes her hand over the deer’s neck. its pulse is thready; lena can see that even through its patchy coat. “if it were me – if I were that sick, I’d take that gamble.”

lena sighs, but they’ve come this far. she dilutes the chelator in water with a few drops of morphine, and cradles each rabbit in her arms as she trickles the drug down their throats. they don’t fight her.

neither does the deer, too weak even to kick at her with its sharp hooves.

her hands shake as she places IVs for fluids, using the smallest gauge needle she can find. even so, her first few tries infiltrate and she has to look for another vein.

“I thought you were a doctor,” kara quips, munching on a riceball. lena throws a used needle at her, like a kryptonian dartboard. she sidesteps easily.

“a doctor of humans,” she mutters. “I’ve never had a patient with so much fur.”

by the next morning, the deer hasn’t gotten up, but it’s awake and licking at its IV site in annoyance. the rabbits are trundling around, huddled together for warmth, and kara (over lena’s objections) moves them inside for shelter.

a match-flame of hope blooms between lena’s ribs, and she does her best to ignore it. she gets to work on a second batch, squinting as she tries to read her own margin notes.

it’s imperfect; on day three shō finds one of the rabbits in rigor mortis, and lena performs an autopsy in miniature. the other strays do better than she expected. they fill out over the next week and a half, nibbling carrots and apple slices from shō’s palm, ribs not quite so sunken anymore.

lena’s not often satisfied – it’s part of what makes her a good clinician, always looking back for a better explanation and forward for a better treatment – but she’s satisfied with this. she sends kara away with the remaining doses, to be smuggled in and given in secret.

with kara gone and shō in class, lena takes her medical bag into the bedroom. she ties the tourniquet with her teeth, and swabs the back of her hand with iodine. she knows, even before she threads the needle into a vein on the back of her hand.

the blood comes out milky white, flowing slow.

#

**september, 1948**

she tells kara. they’re making dinner; kara’s drawing a smiley face and ears in ketchup on an omelet. it’s maybe not the best time, but timing has never been her strong suit.

“that’s not funny, lena.” the ketchup face comes out lopsided, almost sinister. “you’re not dying.”

“this isn’t how I meant to tell you,” lena says, taking the ketchup bottle from kara’s clenched hand. “but there’s still so much I–“ she takes a breath. “I want to play cards with shō, and teach him how to fold his shirts properly; to walk in the korakuen gardens with you, and stay up all night talking. and I want you to prepare your heart.” 

“but the drug works,” kara insists, her voice thick.

“for radiation poisoning, not for leukemia.”

“you can find a cure for it, though. lena. you’re the smartest person I know.”

she wraps her arms around kara’s waist from behind, and kara’s hands come to rest over hers, protective. “someone will. in a year, or a decade, or a century. but it won’t be me.”

kara is ironclad silence, and lena can almost feel the storm churning around her. she turns her until kara’s forced to meet her eyes.

“it was always going to be this way, you know? I was never going to outlive you, or even grow old with you.”

kara shakes her head. “you bury me, that was the deal, remember?” she whispers, fingers digging into the soft skin of lena’s upper arm. when she lets go, there’s a bright bruise in the shape of a handprint on lena’s skin. her eyes prick with tears, and she steps back.

“you’re not hurting me. come here.” lena wraps her arms around kara’s shoulders. “it’s nothing, it’s nothing. I’m just going to bruise easily, for a while.” 

#

it takes a week.

lena vanishes in front of kara’s eyes, despite all the comfort food she makes for her, and which lena is only able to stomach a few bites of. her mother comes down from hiroshima, and lena makes no effort to hide the way she leans into kara when she’s near, the way she looks at her, like the stars and sun begin and end with her. dr. nakamura says nothing, only administers the drugs to make this easier, and changes the damp cloths on lena’s forehead when she spikes a fever. 

when lena’s too weak to walk, kara carries her to the engawa, where shō curls into her as she holds out gobs of peanut butter to the deer they’ve unofficially adopted.

“I want to do this on my own terms,” lena had said to her that first day, and after a string of bad days one morning she says, “it’s time.”

she lays out a box of letters, carefully addressed. there is one for her mother, a few for shō, an even ten for kara. 

and kara could crush the vial of morphine between two fingers, she could absorb the blast from every bomb made in the war, but she can’t even find the strength to speak past the lump in her throat.

“I won’t tell you when to open them,” lena says, tying the letters together with blue silk cord, “but just. so I’ll be there when you need me. and if it’s too much, if you just want to forget“ – she reaches up to touch kara’s cheek – “that’s okay too. you don’t have to read them. in your heart you already know everything I’m going to say.”

“it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” kara says, shaking her head.

“there’s a fascinating new paper about fruit fly metabolism and longevity–“

“don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do what you do, kara. a very high metabolic rate, and so you were able to stay in the same school, to age as they aged, while shō has been a child for more than a decade. and I think – should you ever want to be tied to time again – you can be, if you want. if you want to grow old with someone. and I hope you find that person, one day.”

“I already did,” kara says, her voice breaking.

lena kisses her, gentle even though she doesn’t need to be, and kara carries her into the garden.

there’s a soft breeze, the sun through the trees casting medallions of light on the grass, and there with her head resting on kara’s shoulder and shō’s hand in hers, lena nods. the needle bites into the crook of her arm, and her mother pushes the morphine so kara doesn’t have to.

“ehrosh :bem,” kara whispers, as lena’s pupils contract to pinpoints in her dark eyes. _good journey._

she says goodbye – the first time she gets to say it – and she buries the paper cranes with lena. every name she remembers from krypton, every sleepless night spent coaxing folds into the grain of the paper.

a few weeks after the funeral, she gets a package in the mail, postmarked hiroshima. it’s a copy of the kiyohara family registry, with her name and shō’s added under dr. nakamura’s name as adopted children.

and after almost two decades of war, the world quiets down; it is tired, and kara rebuilds.

#

**epilogue (2013)**

she sees it on a tourist’s shirt, first. her family’s crest in heathered red and blue, and then she can’t un-see it. there are keychains and mugs and even toilet paper rolls branded with the symbol of the house of el.

 **kara [17:30]:** how did this happen?

 **shō [17:33]:** yk it’s 3 am here right  
**shō [17:33]:** how did what happen

 **kara [17:33]:** I’m talking about your “superman” memorabilia.  
**kara [17:34]:** it’s quite the extensive product line, apparently. are you making money off of this?

 **shō [17:35]:** you woke me up to talk copyright law?

 **kara [17:36]:** please, you were awake. I could hear your heart rate from here.

 **shō [17:36]:** you said youd stop doing that

 **kara [17:38]:** it’s like selling a grave. you don’t see it because you didn’t grow up on krypton, but I did. that crest is an honor, and it’s not just yours. if you married someone, they would have worn it over their heart, but then and only then. not because they bought it used for $3.99 on ebay.

 **shō [17:39]:** is this abt lena  
**shō [17:40]:** bc it was half a century ago  
**shō [17:40]:** I get it, you wanted to give it to her and missed your chance, but it doesn’t mean no one else can ever wear it  
**shō [17:41]:** and fwiw im not getting a cent. some company saw a profit and ran w it

she swipes left and deletes the thread, her screen cracking with the force of it. shō calls two days later.

“don’t hang up,” is the first thing he says. “I, um– I’m sorry for what I said, kara. I was hurt. we talk about everything else, but you never ask me about superman. I guess– I wanted you to be proud of me. and I’m sorry I didn’t do more to stop the merchandising and the branding. I know what it means something different to you, to us. but it gives people hope; you should see it.

“we lost an entire planet. but sometimes I look at the people wearing the shirts or the baseball caps and in a way it’s like our house adopted this city, this world. they can be the family we lost.

“kara? you still there?” he says when she doesn’t respond.

“I’m still here,” she says quietly. “and I am proud of you. but I worry, too. it’s hard enough to live one life well; you’re trying to balance two, and keep them separate, secret. you feel duty so keenly that I’m afraid your persona will eclipse you. because at the end of the day, a hero is just a concept: unknowable, untouchable. there’s only loneliness.”

“it’s not always lonely.”

“but people don’t know you. you could change the world in the same way with your journalism, you know. maybe an article changes a policy, and that in turn helps someone keep food on the table, and they don’t resort to theft; maybe your words change the way people think, make the world a little kinder. it’s the same thing you do as superman, just less tangible.”

“and what about you?”

kara laughs. “maybe I like being in the background. it’s nice.”

“come to metropolis,” he says, the same offer he’s made a hundred times. “you can come keep an eye on the L corp branch that just opened up.”

“I did ask her. lena,” she clarifies. “she said save it for someone else. I don’t think– she was never sure of me. I think that a part of her always thought I asked out of pity, or –“

“I’m sorry.”

“you don’t have to be sorry. I just wanted someone else to know.”

#

she moves to national city instead, close enough to shō but far enough to give him space. the city’s different from what she’s used to, but he’s found her a beautiful apartment, with floor-to-ceiling windows and enough light to drown a kryptonian.

her references are decades out of date so kara applies to entry-level jobs instead, with a forged diploma from kyoto university. catco worldwide media is the first to call.

the elevator opens onto an open-plan office, its CEO like a queen in the center of a glass hive. kara knocks once, and cat grant looks up.

“have a seat. so, my 10:15, what makes you so special?”


	3. Chapter 3

**references,** because this tends to be a poorly taught topic in u.s. schools 

1\. first person testimony of hiroshima and nagasaki survivors: [link](http://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2016/08/09/hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic-bomb-survivors/)

2\. atomic heritage foundation (good historical summary, talks about victim consciousness as well): [link](https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/survivors-hiroshima-and-nagasaki)

3\. allied censorship of atomic bomb effects in japan: [link](https://theconversation.com/the-little-known-history-of-secrecy-and-censorship-in-wake-of-atomic-bombings-45213)

4\. haunting photos of burn shadows cast by objects and people in the way of the bomb blast: [link](https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/155844/the-shadows-of-hiroshima-haunting-imprints-of-people-killed-by-the-blast/)

5\. height of detonation calculated for maximum damage: link

6\. radiation injuries: [link](http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp22.shtml)

7\. potential cure for radiation poisoning: [link](https://ideas.ted.com/how-were-making-a-pill-that-cures-radiation-poisoning/)

**Author's Note:**

> leave me a comment if you enjoyed it/want to see more! I live for ao3 pings, and it's my only way to gauge whether a fic is working or not =]
> 
> as always, come throw asks & caffeine & fic recs my way @ mindthewolves.tumblr.com
> 
>  
> 
> \---  
> *kryptonian intercession for the dead adapted from the Salat al-Janazah


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